Tag Archives: mental health

The LAA has amended all current contracts in order to meet the requirements imposed by the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and the Law Enforcement Directive (Directive (EU) 2016/680), being implemented under Part 3 of the Data Protection bill. Amendments regarding the GDPR apply from 25 May 2018. Amendments relating to the Directive apply from 6 May 2018.

There are some detailed obligations. The LAA require you to notify them within 5 business days if you receive the following in relation to LAA or shared data:

A data subject request

A request to rectify, block or erase personal data

A complaint or other communication about your (or the LAA’s) handling of data

A communication from the Information Commissioner

You must also indemnify the LAA if it is fined because you fail to comply with the legislation.

The LAA has sent emails to holders of civil, family and mediation contract holders to inform them about contract extensions to 31 August 2018.

Holders of 2010 contracts (Mediation) and 2013 contracts (Family, Immigration/Asylum, Housing/Debt) need to send back an acceptance form. The letters attached to emails give a deadline of 5 December 2017, the website says 6 December 2017.

Holders of Housing Possession Court Duty Scheme contracts will receive an extension offer in due course.

Holders of welfare benefits, mental health, and community care contracts will have their contracts extended automatically.

Holders of AAP etc., clinical negligence and public law contracts will have their contracts terminated earlier than originally envisaged, so that they will also end on 31 August 2018.

If you haven’t received an email, you should contact the LAA’s central commissioning team: civil.contracts@legalaid.gsi.gov.uk

There have been several developments since we reported that the LAA opened the tender for face to face civil and family contracts to start in September 2018.

Tender open for HPCDS

The Agency has gone ahead with a complex price competitve tender for Housing Possession Court Duty Schemes (HPCDS), which seems unlikely to solve the crisis in finding sufficient practitioners to provide the schemes; but only time will tell. More information can be found here.

Most people are finding the process straightforward

However, most of the feedback we are receiving from practitioners bidding for face to face contracts is that the process is more straightforward than they anticipated.

People like the button which checks whether they have responded to all the questions they need to.

They also like being able to download a PDF of their bid. On the relevant ITT page, look out for the three little dots in the top right hand corner. If you click on that and then select ‘printable view’, you will be able to download a PDF of your bid.

FAQs

The LAA has issued some initial frequently asked questions – FAQs. These are worth reading. Amongst other things, they confirm that you will be able to withdraw from part of your bid without jeopardising the rest of it (FAQ 10.1).

Miscellaneous NMS

All successful bidders will get 5 miscellaneous NMS; but you can bid for 25 or more to undertake compensation claims for vicitims of trafficking and modern slavery. ATLEU (legal charity the Anti Trafficking and Legal Exploitation Unit) is encouraging practitioners to apply. They point out that this work is ideally suited to employment lawyers, discriminantion lawyers, personal injury lawyers and civil litigators more generally. With claims for failure to pay the National Minimum Wage (which are often a feature of such cases) being worth upwards of £100,000, perhaps this is worth considering? More details can be found on ATLEU’s website.

The Legal Aid Agency has opened the tender for civil, family and mediation contracts to start on 1 September 2018. If you want to do legal aid work after 31 August 2018, you must submit a bid by the closing date and time 10 November at 5pm. Details can be found here.

The contracts will run for three years with an option for the LAA to extend for two years. Existing contracts are being extended.

Apart from Housing Possession Court Duty Schemes (HPCDS) and the CLA telephone service, bids are not competitive. As long as you can demonstrate that you meet the LAA’s requirements, and submit a technically correct bid, you will get a contract. The details of the tenders for HPCDS and CLA contracts will be released soon.

Top tips for successful bids

Read the Information for Applicants carefully. The answers are almost always in there somewhere

Where they are not, submit a question through the message board on the portal – the LAA publishes all questions and answers received

Read the FAQs carefully and submit your bid after the final ones are published; but comfortably in advance of the tender closing date

Register your bids on the portal as early as you can and start completing the Selection Questionnaire (SQ) and the Invitation to Tender(s) (ITTs) you are interested in. You will know some of the answers straight away and can come back to the ones you need to go away and find information to complete

Allocate a small team to the bid – say two people to complete it and a third to check it

Make sure several people are registered to receive emails about the bid. Sometimes the LAA raises queries that need to be answered quickly. You don’t want to miss them

The Law Society is running tender workshops throughout England and Wales. They are recommended. Details here.

LAPG is also running workshops between 27 September – 3 October – details here – also recommended.

On the 20th of January, the LAA announced that it intended to run a two-stage tender process for civil and family contracts to start in April 2018 and that stage 1 would probably start in April 2017, with stage 2 in August 2017. In February they announced that a family mediation tender would open at the same time.

On Friday 17 March, they announced that instead they would be running both the selection criteria and invitation to tender stages together in May 2017.

Practitioners will need to remain vigilant and watch out for further LAA announcements. They can be found here.

The LAA has announced that the tender process for civil and family legal aid contracts to take effect in April 2018 will actually start this April, 2017. They will announce their intentions for family mediation contracts in due course. The announcement can be found here.

The agency has reverted to a two-stage process. Stage 1, a selection questionnaire (previously known as a pre-qualification questionnaire – PQQ), followed by an invitation to tender (ITT) in Ausgust 2017 for the following categories:

Family

Housing, debt and welfare benefits

Immigration/asylum (including IRCs)

Claims against public authorities (currently known as Actions against the police etc)

Community Care

Clinical Negligence

Mental Health

Public Law

The LAA stresses that the tender in relation to the above will simply test organisations’ ability to meet minimum tender requirements and all organisations which can do so will be awarded contracts. However, organisations seeking higher numbers of matter starts may need advanced panel accreditation. Family practitioners will be able to apply for licensed work only contracts if they wish.

Timetable

SQ opens – April 2017

Notification of SQ outcome – June 2017

ITTs open (except HPCDS) – August 2017

Notification of ITT outcome – December 2017

Verifiation process – January – March 2018

Contract starts – 1 April 2018

Housing Possession Court Duty Schemes

Those interested in Housing Court Possession Duty Schemes are warned that the government is currently consulting on whether to increase the size of the schemes, so that some could cover a number of courts. They are also considering an element of price competition in relation to HPCDS work. At first sight, it is difficult to see how economies of scale could result by simply grouping courts together as proposed. The consultation opened on Friday 20 January and will close on 17 March 2017. You can download the consultation paper and respond here.

Notification of Housing, Debt and Welfare Benefits contracts will be prior to the HPCDS ITT opening – in October 2017

HPCDS ITT opens – October 2017

HPCDS ITT outcome – January 2018

More flexibility

The LAA says that the new contracts are likely to be more flexible in a number of ways which practitioners may find helpful:

Allowing remote working arrangements such as delivery of advice by email, telephone or video conferencing where appropriate

Ability to self grant up to an additional 50% of matter starts over those awarded

Ability to reallocate up to 50% of matter starts between your own offices (subject to LAA consent)

All organisations will receive 5 miscellaneous matter starts in addition to their category matter starts

Likely changes you may need to plan for

Stricter definition of ’employ’ in relation to supervisors

Changes to the mental health supervisor standard

Limits to representation by counsel/agents in mental health

New mental health capacity (welfare) accreditation will become mandatory for that work when appropriate

The immigration/asylum contract will reflect changes to the IAAS scheme

Immigration/asylum bidders in higher lot sizes will also be able to bid for IRC work

Telephone contracts

The LAA will also be tendering for specialist telephone work, including an element of price competition in the following areas of law: